PHILADELPHIA — Practice was over, though a few guys lingered on the floor, when Doug Collins reached for the medicine ball that was resting behind a bench at PCOM.

It’s what Collins sits upon while meeting with reporters. Friday’s question-and-answer session went for more than eight minutes. It started with the diagnosis of one player, who’s out for the season, and finished with chit-chat about another player, who to date has missed all of the season.

“Par for the course,” Collins said.

Friday brought news that another player had gone down. Jason Richardson is out for the next nine to 12 months. Andrew Bynum, who’s missed the last nine months, is nearing his return.

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With all the injuries upon which to harp, Collins picked a four-letter word he uttered more than once.

Wins?

“Hope,” Collins said.

“It’s the one saving grace. The one thing that can happen when you’re playing is you don’t have any hope,” he said. “If it comes early in the year, it’s tough. I’ve seen it where teams go into the All-Star break and their seasons are over. They come back and have 30 games and guys are playing through the string, there’s 60 more days and they’re planning for the summertime.

“We know how important it is to finish up here before we get to the break and hopefully we stay in the mix.”

Hope. Despite the games they’ve lost, and the players they’ve lost, the Sixers have not lost hope. Keeping that hope, and keeping this team headed in the right direction — until everything, or everyone, is in place — is paramount.

It’d be easy for the Sixers to lose hope. After all, while pairing 27 losses with 21 wins, they also have had seven players sidelined by injury at some point this season — among them, three who had been penciled in as starters during the preseason.

Claiming four wins in six games is a pleasant distraction. Finishing off this eight-game homestand on a winning note would be another. Or at the very least, claiming two of the next three and heading into the All-Star break with a head of steam might make all the difference, especially when you consider what’s down the road.

Unless you’re a conspiracy theorist, there’s no reason to believe Bynum won’t be back before the end of this month. Unless his hamstring acts up, there’s no reason to believe Thad Young’s healing process will require more than four weeks. Unless you believe in the law of averages, there’s no reason to believe Jrue Holiday won’t maintain his All-Star-caliber play.

Outsiders will scream, and they have, that being a player at the trade deadline is in the Sixers’ best interests.

It isn’t.

The most prudent move for the Sixers is inactivity. Retrieving Bynum and Young from the depths of the injury report would provide a lift that no trade can provide. Sacrificing something long-term for a short-term gain, especially in a season in which attaining better than the East’s sixth seed would be a stretch, shouldn’t be an option. Sixers general manager Tony DiLeo has said as much.

Any move at the Feb. 21 deadline might signal a loss of hope, the one thing the Sixers have maintained all these months.

“We’re in a good position on one hand because we have flexibility with contracts,” DiLeo said the other day. “We’re in a bad position, on the other hand, because we just don’t have the answers. We haven’t seen our team out there yet.

“It’s hard to really plan because we don’t have all the answers. Hopefully, we’ll have all the answers by the end of the year and be able to go forward.”